Software defined networking presents a standards based control and data plane solution for building the next generation data centers. For example, the Application Centric Infrastructure provided by Cisco® is a software defined networking solution designed to automate, configure, and manage data center fabrics, and has become popular in enterprise data center environments. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Technology, Inc.
In certain cases, a data center may serve different tenants (i.e., multiple different organizations, separate entities within an organization, etc.). Such data centers, sometimes referred to as multi-tenant data centers, provide logical separation/segregation between each of the different tenants, as well as security, scalability, and per-tenant services, all of which are designed to simplify management and orchestration. As the use of virtualization within data centers expands, security and management are becoming increasingly important.